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News, nuggets and longreads 5 October 2024: The Lonely Londoners

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that grabbed our attention in the past week, from splitting the G to the GBG.

First, some news: if the disappearance of various big beer festivals in the past year seemed significant, then the return of the Campaign for Real Ale’s Great British Beer Festival must also mean something. It’ll be back in 2025 but not at Olympia in London, where it’s been held for about as long as we can remember, but at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham. Birmingham is cheaper to visit and cheaper to get to than London. And, we assume, the venue is cheaper too. We might see you there.


A pint of Guinness.

What on earth is going  on with ‘splitting the G’? For VinePair Evan Rail has been investigating this trend which might, possibly, develop into a bona fide drinking tradition:

Brands founded several centuries ago have a few advantages when it comes to history, lore, and tradition. But for Guinness, a modern social media trend is upending a drinking culture that dates back to 1759… That new phenomenon is called “splitting the G,” in which drinkers try to swallow enough beer on their first drink that the line between liquid and foam ends up halfway through the “G” of the Guinness brand on the glass. (There are variations, like getting the line to land between the text and the brewery’s harp logo just above it, as well as online arguments over the proper procedure, as might be expected from any internet trend.) It sometimes shows up in the form of a bar bet, in which a bartender might offer to pay for the pint if a drinker can split the G perfectly on the first try, or as a competition between friends to see who pays for the round, or just as a bit of fun… And that fun seems to be building steam globally this year after a quiet, unclear origin.


A beermat advertising Macardles Number 1 Ale. It has an illustration of a beer bottle cap being lifted with an opener.

Liam K at IrishBeerHistory has returned to his ‘100 Years of Irish Brewing in 50 Objects’ with a beermat from Macardle’s:

If there is one still-existing beer brand that elicits a wave of nostalgia when mentioned in certain company it’s Macardle’s ale. The ‘Large Mac’ from the shelf, or the cooler depending on your tastes and the weather, has a small but important cult following, who against all odds seem to be keeping the ale alive and stocked in certain bars and off licenses across the country, with a bias towards north Leinster sweeping down towards the southeast of the island. The draught version appears to have vanished entirely from the pub counter even in its literal homeland of Dundalk, gone the way of the Small Mac and the six-pack of dumpy half-pint bottles. Now this once well-known and important brand is only offered in a pint bottle, and by default is normally served with a half-pint, trumpet-shaped pilsner glass. Along with bottled non-nitro Guinness, it is the default choice for many drinkers who prefer the fuller flavours of microbrewed beers and find themselves in a pub in Ireland which only stocks ‘The Usual’ line-up of taps serving the somewhat anodyne output of larger breweries.


Pub window with 'Saloon Bar' and drawn curtains.

In his latest dip into the history of the colour bar in UK hospitality David Jesudason has written about The Dartmouth Arms in Forest Hill, South East London. This is a particularly interesting story because it gets into how the British class system overlaps with racism:

The Dartmouth’s landlord was Harold Hawes who would tell non-white customers to drink in the public bar and leave the saloon if they dare enter. The context here is this is as much a class-based issue as it is a race one because Hawes barred people from the saloon if he deemed them not worthy or respectable… [The] interesting thing to note is the black customers, Browne, Brown and McFarlane, had the type of professions that would’ve led them to naturally gravitate towards the saloon bar. These were a management class but they still had to drink in the public bar even if they were with white contemporaries… Segregating someone due to class would have been something perhaps they were used to living under the British empire abroad. “They might be thinking of themselves as the kind of people who go to a saloon bar if it was in Jamaica.” [historian] Rob [Waters] says. “[When they’re told to go to the public bar] they are experiencing a re-racialisation of how they understood themselves.”


A distinguished looking man with white hair and black-rimmed glasses holding a glass of beer. He is in a Belgian cafe-bar.
Willie Verhoysen. SOURCE: Ashley Joanna/Pellicle.

Who can resist a secret beer? Breandán Kearney has a new book coming out and has shared an extract via Pellicle, about a little-known beer brewed by Brasserie Dupont:

In 2012, Willie Verhoysen was approached with a special task… Verhoysen was the hospitality manager at the Vooruit, a festival and arts centre housed in a grand building in the centre of Ghent. (Vooruit translates to “Onward.”) At the time, Verhoysen had worked at the Vooruit for 28 years, 15 of those managing its kitchens, concert hall bars, restaurant, and café—one of the busiest hospitality venues in the city. “It’s the salon of Ghent,” says Verhoysen… To mark the 100th anniversary of the Feestlokaal’s construction, the Vooruit planned a whole year of festivities. As hospitality manager, Willie Verhoysen was tasked with a special mission: to produce a beer to celebrate the occasion. But he had less than 12 months to do it. The Vooruit no longer had a brewery of its own, so Verhoysen would have to find someone else to brew it.


A country pub in grey stone against a grey sky.
The Robin Hood Inn. SOURCE: Chris Dyson.

The new edition of the CAMRA Good Beer Guide is out and Chris Dyson at Real Ale, Real Music has taken it for a test drive:

The 2025 CAMRA Good Beer Guide was published a few days ago, bringing with it joy to those who had been included, particularly for the first time. The day after publication I visited one such place and then called in a former Guide regular only a couple of miles away that had failed to make the cut once again this time…. Pecket Well is a small village situated on the edge of the Pennine moors a couple of miles out of Hebden Bridge. To get there I turned off the main A646 Calder Valley road as I arrived in the town and then took the A6033 up the hill towards Oxenhope. Houses, some of them over-and-under-dwellings, a feature of this part of the world where flat land is at a premium, were perched on corners at crazy angles and clung to the side of the road for dear life as I began to leave the town behind. Following a twisty and vertiginous climb through dense woodland the road eventually emerged into the open at the fringes of the tree line as the slope began to lessen. Here I came to a welcoming looking pub situated on a gentle corner…


Finally, from BlueSky, Aldi’s German Pilsner-flavoured crisps…

ALRIGHT THAT'S ENOUGH OKTOBERFEST NOW THANKS

[image or embed]

— TenInchWheels (@teninchwheels.bsky.social) September 29, 2024 at 4:15 PM

For more good reading check out Alan McLeod’s round-up from Thursday.

8 replies on “News, nuggets and longreads 5 October 2024: The Lonely Londoners”

Those beer-flavoured crisps prompt the question: has anyone made a crisp-flavoured beer?

Northern Monk did a collab with Seabrooks and made a Cheese & Onion lager and a Prawn Cocktail Gose.

They’ve also done a Scampi Fries ale, a roasted peanut stout and a pork scratching bitter.

Whilst it makes sense for a large chunk of the population, to have a more centrally located venue for GBBF, I know from the experience of countless trade shows that the NEC is a pretty soulless place, and not a venue I would wish to drink beer at.

For those who remember those times, the NEC is rather like Earls Court on steroids!

Full marks to CAMRA though, for trying, and this attempt to break away from the London-centric approach of many past decades.

It has been held in Birmingham, before, I think 1983, but at Bingley Hall not the NEC. It was scheduled for the same venue in 1984 but the hall was damaged by fire and demolished.

A further recollection is that you don’t have to book the whole area at the NEC but surplus space will be partitioned off out of use. so if you want space for drinkers to spread out a bit then someone has to pay for it.

When I’ve been to the Great British Beer Festival in the past it’s been a 3 day affair. Go up to London one day, next day all day at the festival, final day come home. I’ve always stayed in Hammersmith – good selection of pubs and places to eat, shops to buy food to eat at the festival. I’m struggling to think of any reason to want to stay at the NEC for 2 nights. Where to eat? Where to drink? What to do when you’re not at the festival?

From the NEC into central Brum is only a 10-minute train ride, so if I didn’t want to spend all day at the festival I’d be headed there for pubs/food/entertainment.

The GBBF was always a reasonably convenient excuse for a meetup of my old university drinking pals (especially as a good chunk of them are still in greater London). However, next year I’m hoping to entice them up to Brum as it’s local to me. For excursions I was thinking the Stirchley Beer Mile, or possibly a tour of Black Country breweries (Bathams, Holden’s, Ma Pardoes, Sarah Hughes) if people want to go further afield.

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